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Eagle was 19 years old when she consulted me for her bulimia. Two years before this I had had her and her mother in therapy for six months, 30 session altogether, because of a difficult family situation.
Her present, all-consuming problem was her eating orgies. She was “listless, gloomy and brooding”; her eating problem was “disgusting,” and she was guilt-ridden and felt especially “wicked towards mother.” We agreed to try art-interpreting therapy, one session a week till the summer, that is, for about 6 months.
My ambitions for the first sessions were to find out which artistic medium was the most suitable — crayons, colored pencils, poster colors and brushes, or finger paint; in addition, I was hoping to obtain a pictorial expression of her relationship to internalized parental figures and self, of which up to this point I only had her verbal account.
In her first session I encourage her to draw her father. She does so, (picture no. 1) using a brown pencil. The drawing resembles her father, slightly caricatured. It is a quickly drawn sketch. I ask about her associations to the picture:
“Square, benevolent.”
Then I ask her to draw mother (picture no. 2). In return I get Mother in bed with migraine headache — a motionless figure, covered by the bedspread, a sharp profile, closed eyes and long, yellow hair. A dark background emphasizes the gloomy atmosphere. Her drawing occupies only half of the sheet.
“Something is missing in the picture,” I suggest.
Whereupon she draws “a wall” to the left of the bed, herself on the other side of the wall, rigid, gazing in the direciton of where her mother is lying.
“What comes to your mind?”
“It's myself behind a wall — hesitating to go in —”